A progressive voice from the Carolinas, featuring views, news, and dialogue that the corporate media doesn't. In the Mountains of Western North Carolina, Mills River is a rural community about 20 minutes from Asheville.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Your Shower is Next

Speaking of an Orwellian state, here's a new invasion of your privacy that's comin' up real quick. It involves your vehicle being tracked everywhere you go, and the monitoring of how you drive, as well.

The National Transportation Safety Agency (NHTSA), which is in charge of setting motoring regulation, is desperate to get their EDR (Event Data Recorder) plan through asap. They claim it's for safety reasons, so they can reconstruct accidents better, and identify what causes the accidents more accurately. They point to the Black Boxes on aircraft as an example of this, and have worked hard to make their proposal sound just as innocuous and sensible.

However, we are not driving aircraft, we are driving our cars, our own private property, and generally, we don't wish to be monitored in our mobile domiciles any more than we wish to wear an RFD chip on an obedience collar. And somehow - call me paranoid - I can't help but catch a whiff of some insurance industry money and influence in the air. NHTSA wants to make their black box requirement mandatory, starting with all light passenger vehicles sold after September 1, 2014. Needless to say, this will add to the cost of a new car. And it does nothing to make your vehicle safer.

How long before no one can drive a vehicle unless it's wired with a tracking box? Or can't buy insurance unless your vehicle is tracked? Crap like Progressive's "Snapshot", where drivers willingly surrender their privacy in exchange for saving a few bucks, was trotted out as a market test, but now Big Insurance needs Gov-Corp to make everyone participate whether they want to or not. Accelerate too fast? Bingo! Rates are raised immediately. A passenger didn't buckle their seat belt? Ding! Rates go up on the spot. Get the picture?

NHTSA has issued a proposal for public comment in the Federal Register. I strongly suggest going HERE and making your comment before February 13, 2013.

“In the councils of government we must guard against
the acquisition of power, whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties and democratic processes.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower
from his final address to the nation
January 17, 1961

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
--Thomas Jefferson